This list is available over on EJ, but after they took it off the primary thread and gave me a heart attack, I decided to copy it over her for safe keeping. It is still on the old thread but it might be harder to find for everyone there.

Although you can get the pvp rep with the dailies, I remain rather leery of them. I’ll try them soon and we’ll see how it goes on a pvp server. If I can’t even do my Therazane dailies unmolested (srsly guys, I just want to save Pebble, leave me alone)…

If you want to know what the ‘pre-raid’ list looks like as well, here you go:

I used all my writing mojo writing a post on the officer forums today. Naturally this leaves me sitting here staring at a blank wordpress page…so I decided I could just copy and paste my forum post!

It’s not sensitive information (or juicy, soap opera-esque drama) so I think it’s safe enough to plaster across the interwebs.

The topic was offspec gear. BoO uses DKP in 25 man raids, but if no one wishes to have an item for their main spec, then it goes to off spec rolls and costs 0 DKP. The debate arose over whether or not a pure DPS class should be allowed to roll for off spec gear. We’re leaving weapons out of the equation because they can be a slightly different kettle of fish, if you’re wondering.

Here, there, is my opinion on pure DPS classes rolling on off spec gear against the tanks and healers:

Healers and tanks both, due to the nature of raiding, sometimes HAVE to DPS in the raid. Either the fight requires a varying number of tanks, or the fight requires a varying number of healers. Also consider that as we get better at content, we need less healers…leading, potentially, to having to bench several of our healers as we PROGRESS in content.

That in mind, tanks and healers both have a legitimate claim to off set gear for a raid setting. If DPS were allowed to roll on “offspec” gear along side the tanks and healers, then this would drastically reduce the chance of them getting any offspec gear, leaving them-and the raid-at a disadvantage. I’m already competing for MAIN spec gear with the DPS as well as my fellow healers, due to the quirks of my class and spec (we can’t all be holy paladins). I don’t have DKP to spare, either. If the DPS claims their main spec loot, and then starts claiming their off spec loot…well, if I’m doing 3k on a boss fight later in my Ulduar10 DPS gear because the mage needed 3 robes for his 3 different specs…that’d be why. As a pure DPS you can DPS as Y spec in X spec ideal gear. The holy paladin can’t do jack shit in her healing gear as ret. I’m not sure how this disadvantage is less damaging to the raid than the pure DPS not being optimal for some fights. DPS has never been optimal for all fights. This is why you like to have variety in your raid group.

While some stats may not be OPTIMAL on certain gear, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically offspec and available gratis. I mean fuck, if you want to do that, then half of my gear was really offspec gear because it’s better for holy than for disc. And take my hunter-the quirks of a BM hunter mean that to get anywhere I’m wearing a lot of stuff that doesn’t have OPTIMAL stats.

I think that allowing DPS to roll on “off spec” gear is a path I don’t care to go down. For one thing, not everyone knows the ideal stats for certain specs and classes. Not everyone agrees with them, either. What seems like an obvious offspec piece to you might not seem that way to JimBob over there, leaving the officers with a lot of potential misunderstandings and hurt feelings to soothe.

Think back to the days before dual specs. You didn’t swap specs for this fight or that one. You just knew you were good for some fights and not so good for others. Not everyone has dual specs, either-they aren’t a necessity for raiding, as helpful as they are. I do not feel that content is so tightly tuned for non-hardmode raids that the DPS needs the best gear for multiple specs, not when the tanks and healers are just as if not more likely to use the same gear in any given encounter.

In the first few months of WotLK raiding, when I went holy for the first time, you would have had to pry crit from my cold dead hands. I went the way of the holy/ret build back then, because holy/prot hadn’t yet seen the changes of 3.1 that made it the viable (and my preferred) spec that it is now. I think I went insane over the fact that Soul of the Dead NEVER dropped for us from Sapphiron, week after week, and I’m pretty sure that when it finally did and I snatched it up, I let out my biggest happy squeal of all time. Torch of Holy Fire? Screw that, I’m snatching The Turning Tide away from our warlocks.

These days, I’m tooting a very different horn. I love haste and I can’t get enough of it, so much that I’m sitting well above the recommended 675 soft cap for haste rating from gear. Because we don’t always run with a boomkin in 10s and very rarely have a ret paladin, I don’t get the buffs from those classes in regards to haste, so I try to keep as much as possible on my gear, and I eat haste buff food.

Why the change? Well for one thing, crit just isn’t as good as it used to be. Critical strikes don’t return as much mana as they used to, so that benefit has gone a little out of the window, not to mention that improved gear from Naxx to Ice Cream Social and epic gems mean that mana pools are higher than ever. I can’t remember the last time that I felt truly strained for mana or felt that I would run dry with no chance to recover, even when chain casting Holy Light on fights like Marrowgar or Festergut or … everything else in ICC. Crit is nice for having those BIG NUMBERS heals, but in many cases the crits are just overheals for a class that has high overhealing anyway (not that there’s a problem with this – as long as you have mana and things don’t die, who cares about overheal?). Just sticking with the critical strike rating that’s on spell plate and other pieces, and the amount that you’ll naturally get from nom nom noming intellect gems should be sufficient – I just don’t see the benefit in gemming for crit rating when you can easily get to 30% or more holy crit from gear.

Haste on the other hand, while it has diminishing returns, is something that you can’t really go wrong with having a little more of. The more haste, the more spells you can cast. If you’re starting harder content, it can be a real life saver in terms of how much throughput you can manage. While you have a chance of getting critical strike heals that will top someone off, with haste there is a guarantee that you’ll be able to quickly put out a second heal. For me it’s a more reliable tool for OHCRAP moments, and probably the only thing that facilitates surviving fears in 5 mans (but that’s a whole ‘nother rant). I feel more secure with having plenty of haste and knowing that my heals have a higher probability of landing in time – our limitation is really speed rather than throughput or longevity. Also, this is what casting looks like when you’re hopped up on haste:

For srs.

Of course, the exception to all of this is the FoL build, in which case you don’t want haste OR crit, you want MOAR SPELLPOWER. That’s a completely foreign territory for me, but maybe someday I’ll give it a try for fun and ~SCIENCE~.

Apparently if I bitch on my blog about not getting trophies, I get a trophy. So excuse me while I bitch about it one more time, just in case.

That said, I peeked at WoW-heroes and saw that I was…#30 in guild. There are alts above me. I am a victim of three things: random loot tables, fail dice rolls, and being too nice.

I am, for example, still wearing an ilevel 200 ring. Rings have dropped. Rings have dropped and even only had one or two other people rolling on them. Did I roll, too? Oh hell no. That ring has mp5 on it…fuck if I’m going to roll against a shaman for an mp5 ring, no matter how much it trashed my other ring in all other stats.

Said shaman would slap me aside the head for that, but there you go.

Getting gear as a priest is a lot harder than getting gear as a healing paladin, that’s for sure. I kind of LOL at Josh, who bitches about rolling against 2 or 3 other people for tanking gear. Honey, do you know how many mages we have?

And how many warlocks?

And how many other priests?

Can you shut the fuck up, please?

I do wonder, though, if maybe I should stomp on that behavior of mine and become more aggressive with loot. It’s not good for your tank healers to lag behind in gear, now is it? It is, by nature, a (somewhat) more solitary job than raid healing. It might shed light on why I flail so hard if I don’t have Kotakh to toss supporting hots, for example.

Or…maybe not. Maybe it’s just the nature of the beast-sometimes the tank will dip a wee bit lower than we like and heart attacks will be had regardless of healer gear.

Or maybe 3.3 will hit next week and I can just go loot hoover from the new 5 mans and it won’t matter anyway!

And theoretically, on rare occasions, we also have an @Orithea! On less rare and more wordy occasions, we also have a James. Who does not have a Twitter because he is fail? Anyway, there had to be some bubbles in this blog somewhere.